Weekend tech reading: What HTPC users can expect from Trinity

AMD's Trinity: An HTPC perspective Intel started the trend of integrating a GPU along with the CPU in the processor package with Clarkdale / Arrandale. The GPU moved to the die itself in Sandy Bridge. Despite having a much more powerful GPUs at its disposal (from the ATI acquisition), AMD was a little late in getting to the CPU-GPU party. Their first full endeavour, the Llano APU (we're skipping Brazos / Zacate / Ontario as it was more of a netbook/nettop part), released towards the end of Q2 2011. AnandTech

Life with a Chromebook: three months of love and hate in the cloud Just over three months ago, I woke up to find that the display on my trusty HP EliteBook 6930p was broken. I'd left the machine -- a faithful companion since my second year at university -- on the floor of my apartment during a party, and, from the profile of the crack, it looked like it had come into contact with somebody's foot. With replacement LCDs for the bulky model costing upwards of $80 on eBay, I decided to consign it to a corner of my room and look for something new. The Verge

Meeting a troll... I'm back on Twitter. I can imagine the cries of 'I knew he wouldn't last!' from the Twitterati. But give me a few minutes of your time and I'll tell you why I'm back and the real truth about exactly why I left in the first place. When I left Twitter numerous people thought it was as a result of an overreaction on my behalf. That my departure was a kneejerk reaction to a couple of 'trolling' or 'flaming' incidents or that I was attention seeking. The reality of the situation is that my wife and I were targeted for over 3 years. Traynor's Eye

Big Brother on a budget: How Internet surveillance got so cheap When Libyan rebels finally wrested control of the country last year away from its mercurial dictator, they discovered the Qaddafi regime had received an unusual gift from its allies: foreign firms had supplied technology that allowed security forces to track nearly all of the online activities of the country’s 100,000 Internet users. That technology, supplied by a subsidiary of the French IT firm Bull, used a technique called deep packet inspection (DPI) to capture e-mails, chat messages, and Web visits of Libyan citizens. Ars Technica

Valve interview: 'I just told Gabe he was full of shit' It’s no secret that Valve is a busy studio with fingers in many pies. It's an anomaly ruled by no-one, free from the shackles of publisher ownership, and willing to venture into the unknown. It experiments, innovates, iterates and forms opinion across the industry. It’s an inspiration to many. But It's also a mystery to many people. How does it work? What will it do next? Why does it operate according to such strange and unique ideologies when its competitors are doing something else? VG247

Telecom companies must look at data services for revenues, not voice: Kapil Sibal Telecom minister Kapil Sibal today said the mobile phone operators must move from voice- based revenue model and customers should gradually be charged only for data services and not for making calls. "At the moment, revenue of industry depends on voice, it is time that the industry decides to move in a direction where revenues come from data and not from voice," Sibal said while speaking at CII broadband summit. The Times of India

How video game statistics could transform war Much of the U.S. military's younger generation has grown up playing video games that constantly tell players how well they're doing on the virtual battlefield -- whether it's the screen turning red to warn of low health or displays showing the world's top-scoring players based on reviving fallen friends and killing enemies with certain weapons. A U.S. Army weapons engineer thinks that, with the right technologies, such gaming-world awareness could become real for tomorrow's soldiers. TechNewsDaily

Newsflash: U.S. broadband expensive, uncompetitive Usually when the mainstream press talks about high broadband prices, there's no explanation given and the dots are never connected. In most press narratives high prices simply exist as if created magically -- occasionally with the subtle implication that U.S. broadband is just so difficult to provide or just so damn awesome that high prices are justified. Obviously that's not true, given that the United States is thoroughly mediocre in every possible global broadband metric... DSL Reports

The Insomniac game that never was: Monster Knight In August, I traveled to Burbank, California to visit the office of Insomniac Games. Best known for its PlayStation-exclusives ranging from Spyro to Ratchet & Clank to Resistance, Insomniac is on to different things these days, most notably Fuse, the multiplatform title previously known as Overstrike. The sole reason for my visit was to interview the studio’s major players for an extensive history of Insomniac, which you will be able to read in the coming days on IGN. IGN

The case for abolishing patents (yes, all of them) Our patent system is a mess. It's a fount of expensive litigation that allows aging companies to linger around by bullying their more innovative competitors in court. Critics have suggested plenty of reasonable reforms, from eliminating software patents to clamping down on "trolls" who buy up patent portfolios only so they can file lawsuits. But do we need a more radical solution? Would we be possibly be better off without any patents at all? The Atlantic

Dappled things: Pinkhassov on Instagram We are not mayflies. We have known afternoons, and we live day after day for a great many days. This long experience of how days turn -- how afternoon becomes late afternoon and late afternoon becomes night -- informs any photographic work we do with natural light. The time of day at which the light is at its most glorious photographers call the golden hour: you’ve seen them toting cameras on street corners and in abandoned lots... The New Inquiry

Next-generation na-ion secondary battery will be new age energy For cell phones, laptop PCs, and hybrid electric vehicles, many of batteries currently used in electrical appliances familiar to us are called lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion batteries are excellent in storage capacity and achieve high energy, as compared to the conventional batteries such as lead acid, Ni-Cd, and Ni-MH batteries, and are being widely commercialized in various electrical appliances. Tokyo University of Science

How it’s made: Switch’s liquid-filled light bulbs As you might have guessed, the liquid-filled light bulb you see above is quite different from the average lamp. Made by Switch Lighting, they are filled with liquid silicone, have a clever compensation piston inside that deals with internal pressure, and the LQD cooling system is able to handle a serious about of heat, enough to produce 1600 lumens (that’s 100W equivalent) from up to 12 LEDs. ExtremeTech

Former copyright boss: new technology should be presumed illegal until congress says otherwise One of the reasons why we live in such an innovative society is that we've (for the most part) enabled a permissionless innovation society -- one in which innovators no longer have to go through gatekeepers in order to bring innovation to market. This is a hugely valuable thing, and it's why we get concerned about laws that further extend permission culture. Techdirt

AMD attempts to shape review content with staged release of info Review sites like TR are a tricky business, let me say up front. We work constantly with the largest makers of PC hardware in order to bring you timely reviews of the latest products. Making that happen, and keeping our evaluations fair and thorough, isn't easy in the context of large companies engaging in cutthroat competition over increasingly complex technologies. The Tech Report